KVR Audio

do_androids_dream · Post by **do_androids_dream** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 2:57 pm

Thanks for the info Whyte + Garry. Getting quite interested in this.

xoxos · Post by **xoxos** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 8:36 pm

i may be drifting into the vagaries of my ego in this post, due to my extremely casual awareness of the products in question,

afaik they're strictly sample playback and dynamism is a product of # of files, which on occasion seem rather finite. other vocal instruments use synthesis wholly, which can take a fair bit to analyse and render.

there are intermediate methods that offer more flexibility than switching wavs that would be easier to prepare if anyone wants a go at making voice instruments.. eg. julius smith has an example of bowed synthesis that simply triggers an impulse of the violin body at audio rate combined with noise. using a windowed waveform like this is easy to code and offers increased synthesis by eg. jittering the rate, formant shifting by playing the frame faster and slower, and more correlated crossfading between phonemes once such things are applied. basically with a windowed waveform you can achieve a lot of timbral flexibility without having to mess with filters or spectral processing or any even slightly hard math.

stikygum · Post by **stikygum** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 10:51 pm

garryknight wrote: Oh, almost forgot. There is a plugin version available for Cubase 7. I guess Yamaha has a special relationship with Steinberg.

Update: I've just found Realivox Blue which might prove better in some cases than Vocaloid.

Yeah, they must have some sort of deal worked out to only allow Steinberg Cubase users to use it. I don't even think Yamaha cares about Mac users, but luckily Cubase is a Mac application.

I've seen some libraries like the Realivox one for Kontakt. Seems like maybe it's not too hard to make a library that does Vocaloid stuff in Kontakt for these developers.

garryknight · Post by **garryknight** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 5:58 pm

xoxos wrote: afaik they're strictly sample playback

Yes, Yamaha's Vocaloid synthesis engine is based on fragments of samples, as this page explains.

I think that part of the reason it sounds synthesized is that if you want an 'ah' sound, it plays the 'ah' sound. Whereas in Realivox Blue, which 'ah' sound you get depends on what preceded it. The 'ah' in 'yah' will sound quite different from the 'ah' in 'bah', for example.

However, while Blue is a lot more realistic than any of the Vocaloids, it's short on vowel sounds, only having 'Ah', 'Eh', 'Ee', 'Oh', 'Oo', and 'Uh'. It's still possible to make words with other vowels, though, such as 'B Eh Ee B Ee' which sounds like a quite realistic 'baby' when sung. It would be nice to have a few more vowels, but considering that there are already over 12,000, and considering the number of combinations of possible start consonants, vowels, and end consonants in a syllable, it would rapidly start to eat hard disk space.

garryknight · Post by **garryknight** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 6:03 pm

stikygum wrote: Yeah, they must have some sort of deal worked out to only allow Steinberg Cubase users to use it. I don't even think Yamaha cares about Mac users, but luckily Cubase is a Mac application.

So they do care, after all

stikygum wrote: I've seen some libraries like the Realivox one for Kontakt. Seems like maybe it's not too hard to make a library that does Vocaloid stuff in Kontakt for these developers.

I think Yamaha would prefer to do all of their products solely as Yamaha products. It would be very nice to load a Vocaloid instrument into Kontakt and start laying down MIDI tracks to drive it. But then you'd still need all of the parameter editing in place, and DAWs don't typically have those kind of parameters - formant control, for example. So they'd have to rewrite the whole thing so that every parameter was controllable by MIDI. It's possible, but I can't see them doing it.

Hans25 · Post by **Hans25** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 6:07 pm

Didn't Yamaha purchase Steinberg?

wagtunes · Post by **wagtunes** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 6:28 pm

I think for electronic and especially chiptune music this thing would be perfect. First I'm hearing of it but I've been hoping for something like this for years.

BiancaNeve · Post by **BiancaNeve** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 6:43 pm

I have avana running on mac via crossover. If I were it buy the vocaloid 4 for cubasis mac version do you think it would work.

garryknight · Post by **garryknight** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 7:41 pm

Hans25 wrote:Didn't Yamaha purchase Steinberg?

Oh, you're right. So we'll probably never see a version for another DAW.

teacue · Post by **teacue** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 9:10 pm

Some informations on the upcoming Vocaloid 4:
http://www.vocaloid.com/us/

dakkra · Post by **dakkra** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 9:19 pm

For Vocaloid 4 I've been enjoying listening to the demos of Cyber Diva:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBd2Upg-kQM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJfL_GNREWk

LoopyFruit · Post by **LoopyFruit** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 9:32 pm

teacue wrote:Some informations on the upcoming Vocaloid 4:
http://www.vocaloid.com/us/

I emailed them in January and this is the reply.
............................................................................................................
"Thank you for contacting Yamaha's VOCALOID Products Customer Center.

About the inquiry, if you lives in US, you will be able to buy it
from the websites of our dealers in this spring.

Please wait for our information about the dealers in which you can buy it.

If you are not live in US, unfortunately, you can not buy it at present.

Thank you.

Best Regards,"
.....................................................................................................

Hope they start selling download versions in the likes of JRR Shop, it's just too expensive for me to buy the boxed version.

wagtunes · Post by **wagtunes** » Sun Feb 01, 2015 11:16 pm

dakkra wrote:For Vocaloid 4 I've been enjoying listening to the demos of Cyber Diva:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBd2Upg-kQM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJfL_GNREWk

I don't care what anybody says. This is just freakin awesome.

Some 20 something years ago (could have been longer, don't remember) when I got Roland's Vocalist (remember that?) I said to myself, "Why can't they just make a piece of software that sings for you? And you can program it to sound like any singer you want, even famous ones like McCartney or Lynne or Plant or even Bob Dylan.

I was told I was crazy.

Wait for it. Celebrity Vocaloid is coming.

It's just a matter of time.

xoxos · Post by **xoxos** » Mon Feb 02, 2015 4:37 am

here's the first audio from syng3 in beta now. two quick voices (consonant transition time is a bit gummy on the first) -

http://xoxos.net/temp/1104.mp3

note that this sequence has no modulation whatsoever at present, not even pitch modulation, so the massaging that makes a synth model worthwhile is absent. i'll stop crashing the vocaloid thread now.

Northwood Mediaworks · Mon Feb 02, 2015 6:05 am

Check out Plouge Chipspeech, the audio demos are pretty cool. Listen to #9, crossword puzzle.

http://www.plogue.com/products/chipspeech/

What is the general consensus on Vocaloid?